Diane Arbus was American photography’s bravest detective. Born in 1923 and raised in leafy privilege (her father was the president of a department store on Fifth Avenue), the young Arbus spurned the path of bourgeois domesticity and propriety to patrol the outskirts and no-go areas of the demimonde, armed with only a 35-mm. Nikon and a fierce supply of inquisitive nerve. She haunted flea circuses, carnival sideshows, and strip clubs, made nighttime expeditions into Times Square and Coney Island (then at their most dangerous and squalid), and recorded life on the fly on New York City streets. READ ON

With opera being one of the most exhilarating forms of escapism the human race has yet devised, you might suppose it would offer respite from the grubby chicanery of contemporary politics, but since John Adams’s Nixon in China debuted, in 1987, such quaint assumptions no longer apply. While the Nixon gang—led by that perennial provocateur Peter Sellars, with Alice Goodman on board as librettist—went boldly where no one had gone before, these days traffic on the highway of so-called CNN opera is heavy. Just this month, fans have three specimens of the genre to choose from. READ ON

The glamour of the fin-de-siècle and the interwar years has the force of a doomed fairy tale, a mysterious energy that can be read, in retrospect, as deep denial of looming upheaval ahead. This glowing tension will be on view starting February 20 at the Neue Galerie, where a major retrospective on the Austrian photographer Madame d’Ora examines a career of 50 years, 1907 to 1957, through more than 100 photographs. READ ON